"Many days pass in darkness, the sun and moon and stars blocked out by volcanic smoke and toxic ash, a pall sometimes red, orange or yellow. Water is rationed."

"People buy homemade toilet paper from peddlers on the street using the tabs from aluminum cans as currency. There’s no internet, no television or radio. Wandering immigrants seeking asylum sleep packed in the tail of a crashed jetliner.... The possession of books is illegal. In their indefatigable resourcefulness, people fabricate their own media to clandestinely convey text, like the 'halceamadon,' a complexly folded piece of parchment paper containing a microscript written backward. At the crux of it all is a cohort of intractable women who resist the prevailing regime and struggle to live authentic, exuberant lives in the face of tyrannical repression and widespread deprivation....."

Writes Mark Leyner, reviewing "Brother Brontë" in "I’ll Have the Psychedelic Dystopia With Everything on It/Fernando A. Flores’s new novel imagines a bleak world where books are illegal and deprivation is the norm. It’s a blast" (NYT).

At one point, Leyner asserts, "'Brother Brontë' is like that mythical sub sandwich with literally everything on it."

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "I'm reading about 'a mythical sub sandwich with literally everything on it.' What's that?" and "The NYT used the expression as if it might be from some comedian and I got the impression that 'everything' was portrayed as literal, beyond just food, and including every item in the world, in the universe. Reminds me of the old Woody Allen [?] joke about a Zen monk asking at a deli counter, 'Make me one with everything.'"

In its answer, Grok formulated a joke I actually liked: "I ordered a sub with everything—now it’s got salami, provolone, the Andromeda Galaxy, and my childhood trauma, and the guy’s still asking if I want it toasted!"